Ask HN: What was the best paper you read in your life?

17 points·Siira··12 comments

I posted this a few months ago.. https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/greatworks/shannon38.pdf Claude Shannon's 'A symbolic analysis of relay and switching circuits'

I studied physics and literary theory, and I greatly enjoyed the paper at the center of the Sokal affair [0]: Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. [1]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

[1]: https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v2_noafterword.pdf

The Sunday Boston Globe in 1998/1999 -- every week there were literally over 100 pages of help wanted ads, a large percentage of them software-related. (Some weeks the Help Wanted section was 150+ pages.)

Oh, I was confused by your comment at first. I was looking for the reference to the academic/scientific paper in your comment but got to the end and wondered if the comment was truncated or something. Then I got it, the Sunday Boston globe was the paper you were talking about. Nice.

Not strictly a paper, but Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species.

Computer Science as empirical inquiry : Symbols and Search. https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~kuipers/readings/Newell+Simon-cac...

Einstein's 1905 paper on special relativity.

Classic. Schrodinger's quantum biology

Proof of an external world, G. E. Moore.

Have a link?

I had a photocopy for more than twenty years. But it's gone. A university library will probably be your best bet.

http://selfpace.uconn.edu/class/ana/MooreProof.pdf

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